WASHINGTON — Sheryl L. Hall came back to work one Monday in the fall
of 1996 and noticed something wasn’t right. Someone had broken into her
locked office over the
weekend.

A file drawer was ajar. Files had been rifled. Sensitive papers were
missing.

The cleaning crew? Street burglars? Not at this address. Hall officed
in the New Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House
complex.

Security wasn’t aware of any pattern of breaches there. Once the head
of all White House computer operations, Hall was the only one with the
key to her office, besides the security crew.

She asked her superiors about it, but they didn’t seem concerned. So
she reported the break-in to the Secret Service.

Not long after, someone entered her office again to snoop around —
this time during the week. Her office was unlocked at the time.

Hall, a seven-year Clinton White House veteran, last month blew the
whistle on an alleged cover-up involving White House e-mails sought by
Congress, the independent counsel and a government watchdog group.

WorldNetDaily has also learned that Hall’s website was mysteriously
knocked off line last year, just as she was huddling with Judicial
Watch, a public-interest law firm
that’s suing the White House over various scandals.

The papers lifted from her office files relate to a computer project
Hall was ordered to work on in 1994. She refused to help with the
project after seeing that it involved keying in personal data about
political donors. Officially named the White House Office Database, or
WHODB, the project was also known among staffers as “Big Brother.”

Hall, a career civil servant, warned the political appointees
building the database that it violated federal laws against using
government resources for fund-raising. For that, she was cut out of the
loop and branded as “disloyal,” memos from top Clinton aides show.

Then she was demoted from her post as chief of the Information
Systems and Technology branch of the Executive Office of the President.

In 1996, Congress was investigating the database project and had
subpoenaed the White House for relevant documents.

Also, Hall lost her authority over the White House computer system
just before a supposed technical “glitch” stopped computers from
archiving incoming e-mail to senior White House aides in the fall of
1996. The problem, which has denied investigators subpoenaed e-mail,
lasted until late 1998.

“They were trying to move her out of the way,” a Hall confidant said
of the demotion. “It was intimidation.”

When Hall told her supervisors of the office break-in, they brushed
it aside, the source says, suggesting to her that someone might have
gone in her office to look for “a wipe-off board.”

“They didn’t seem to mind that her office was broken into,” the
source said.

Repeated calls to the White House press office on the matter were not
returned. Hall’s supervisor at the time, Charles D. Benjamin, who has
also left the White House, is overseas and could not be reached for
comment.

Asked for a copy of Hall’s complaint, a spokesman for the Secret
Service’s uniformed division says it will take awhile to search the
unit’s “central files,” which are not computerized.

In another curious development, Hall’s website was taken down without
her consent about a month before she quit her White House job last year.
One day it just disappeared into the ether.

The site, whodb-purge.org, was carried by Erols.com and registered
with Network Solutions. The Erols.com webmaster could not explain to
Hall what happened to it or even date when it went off the server.

Hall, who was told there was no back-up, decided not to rebuild the
site, which documented her conflicts with Clinton appointees over the
donor database.

Calls to Erols.com’s webmaster at the time were not returned.

Hall hasn’t had any luck trying to tell her story on the major TV
networks, either.

The news organizations, which later confirmed WND’s report, claimed
her story lacked “corroborating evidence.”

But in testimony before Congress last week, six computer contractors
— including the team leader — all repeated Hall’s charge that they
were ordered by the White House to keep quiet about the missing e-mail.

It’s not known if CNN’s news division, which is run by President
Clinton’s some-time golfing partner Rick Kaplan, or ABC News, which
employs former top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, will now air
their interviews with Hall.